


Passing Wolves

by Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Melancholy, Relationship Study, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24369262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/pseuds/Coffin%20Liqueur
Summary: "I wanted shit to change," she says.
Relationships: Julie/Frank Morrison
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Passing Wolves

"I wanted shit to change," she says.

"Hey..." Mild. Burnt-throated. He levers to turn her way, just that much further. Two fingertips to the side of her jaw to turn her head, a little. The tiniest, tiniest flick of exasperation through the front of her brain. "It did, didn't it?"

Through all the dust, it picks up a li'l. He means to encourage her. He thinks they've won something; he really does.

She can't hold it against him too bad. Or too long. Not against that warm ol' magnet-pull of _toward_ . That simultaneous safety and excitement. A shift of her shoulder bounces her a little against the couch. She hums a couple of laughs - some roughness and point as an engine in her chest coughs. Her lips twist a little. Cheek and wryness hand in hand. "Well, I mean, we're not _totally_ out of the sticks," she says.

It’s still Ormond. Their _favorite_ Ormond, but it’s still cold, casket-gray Ormond, looming behind the backdrops of sun-drenched stateside fields, and towns from the movies - once, they threw popcorn at those towns, laughing and crowing and smoking and gallivanting on her or Sue’s couch.

And now they only seemed faker. Cheaper.

More temporary.

He breathes less an actual laugh than a simple reply. His eyes narrow 'long with his grin. She shuts hers as he leans over - shifts onto an elbow, picks a thin shock of hair off her forehead and gives it a couple of pulling plays. "We're somewhere way bigger than the sticks, now," he says. His voice low-burns hot. "And wherever we go, we're the big dogs.

"For real."

"We coulda been the big dogs anywhere we went," she says. Letting the color leach outta the pictures in her mind. Staring at a frosted, still image of the ceiling. Contemplatively. An image in a mirror.

 _All along_ , she thinks. It isn't the first time she has, in these quite li'l moments.

You don't need to make a sacrifice to run off into the night. No god opened any gate on the road out of town.

Just plucked them into suspension, off a map big enough for the four of them and then some. Plenty of territory to be staked, back there.

But no.

Suspension.

"Why didn't we skip town...?" she says, finally. Turning in toward him with her face like a mask. Tucking in close against his chest.

It's cold. It's always cold.

He doesn't say a word, then. Just breathes. Air moving rough through the hollow and dark of a pipe beginning to rust. He knows what she's talking about. She doesn't look at him.

"...We were still thinking too small," he says, finally. Still empty, dry air. None of his characteristic fire. Just... bones. Strung up; cluttering together, gently, in a low, long wind. Setting himself down to gradually weight into the couch beside her. Sucks in air through that twice-broken nose - pulls his arm around her - and lets it out as "Playing kings of the castle was tiding us over - ...we didn't have a fire under our ass..."

"You always have a fire under your ass, Frank," she says.

It's still cold and ringing empty.

Matter-of-fact and lost.

_No. That's no excuse._

"Guess even I needed a wake-up call," he says.

Too proud not to.

...She takes comfort in knowing that’s what’s going on.

But on nights like this, the comfort is cold.

Her eyes turn bleary down her torso; she shuts her eyes restfully - a small lift in the lower lids from below in a sense of determined intake, yeah, like that - at his arm wrapping tighter; him shifting his weight sideways to bring his body closer against her.

Sometimes, he’s the one thing which she _does_ feel truly okay with seeming unchanging. Something which she can say that she knows well, _fondly_. Same way she feels about the others, but with Frank’s ever-present fireburst of rebelliousness and determination that, at the best of times, has always seemed almost friggin’ divine.

Other times, it makes her just as weary as every other unchanging thing does.

Makes her subtly scowl, detached from where she’s lying on the battered couch and resting in her own mind as she is now.

Except at these times, it’s bad because she can’t help but believe it’s deliberate.

That he’s unchanging based on a lie.

She knows him, and he knows _her_ , and _she knows that he knows her._

He knows that she has come to hate this just _like_ one would hate a shitty town with nothing for miles, or a dead-end job.

And likewise, she knows that he knows this, and knowing him, pride won’t allow him to admit that it’s his fault.

**Author's Note:**

> Whoof, I know that this is probably a bit too... short and simple to justify this link, but the atmosphere I had in my head when I wrote this could be described as "inspired by the song '[You're So Cool](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mrdDjUkfZU)' by Nicole Dollanganger".
> 
> If you are a fellow Legion fan, and _especially_ a fellow Legion member/Legion member shipper, then _oh my god please listen to that song if you don't know it already; it's the perfect song for that purpose._


End file.
